Dragon Quest VI provides a familiar and solid RPG experience but just isn't quite up to par when compared to the other Dragon Quest games released on DS.

This turn based RPG takes the same story route as pretty much all the other DQ games. An unnamed hero takes on a quest to rid the world of evil and saves the day. But, this time the story is a little confusing and vague and ends up being something I really didn't pay attention to much. The game begins with you as the hero along with a couple other characters storming a castle to take on an evil fiend. You don't fight the battle though, you watch the party lose and you just wake up in a town. It's jarring and confusing and early on that's an interesting plot twist. Also very early in the game you discover you can journey between two different worlds (each with it's own world map) by going through wells and other means. As time goes on this only adds to the confusion when you're trying to locate someplace specific and you just can't remember which world to go to. Also, there was a point in the game where I spent probably 10-20 hours just exploring the two worlds and really didn't know what my objective was. I heard about pieces of legendary armor and that I was on a journey of self discovery but I didn't know what evil I was trying to defeat or anything else. It's quite vague. It felt like I just went from town to town solving problems and defeating mini-bosses and not really making a lot of progress. I won't go any deeper into the story as to not spoil it but when compared to DQ IV or DQ V I found this story plot as easily the worst.

The graphics are on par when compared to the other DQ games on Nintendo DS. It's basically a 16 bit SNES type formula with a few 3D elements tossed in. When exploring towns and castles you can use the 'L' and 'R' button to rotate the town so with the extra top screen you can see more and decide where to go. This unfortunately doesn't exist in dungeons where it'd be the most useful. The music is solid as well with very familiar tunes if you've played any of the other DQ games.

Fortunately the battle system is just like the other DQ games. You have up to 4 in a party and you take on anywhere from 1 to several enemies in a battle. It's turned based and encounters are random out on the world map and in dungeons. After you play the game for a while you'll unlock vocations you can learn and that ranges from a Warrior, Martial Artist to a Mage, Priest, and Dancer. After mastering the more "simple" vocations you can learn more advanced ones like Paladin, Gladiator, and Sage. What's nice about this that you learn so many skills it's almost impossible to use and get familiar with them all. This gives a lot of variety when it comes to how you want to attack enemies. In fact, it would be useful for you to change the tactics and have the computer take control of your fellow members of the party just to see what it decides to do for attacking. It can give you ideas when it comes to fighting bosses.

You level up your characters by accumulating experience from battles but to advance in your vocation its based on number of battles won. You'd think this would be easy in the sense you can just go beat easy battles to rack up victories fast. This, however, is not the case. If you take on too easy of enemies the battles won't count towards your vocation meaning if you're going to grind it's best to do it against the strongest enemies you've encountered so far. What's frustrating is I don't know where the line is drawn so sometimes you wonder if you're making progress or not.

As you advance the story and open new areas of the two worlds how you do it changes. Early on the game is very linear where there are even gates patrolled by soldiers keeping you out simply by saying it's too dangerous. That makes things feel restrictive early in the game but fortunately as you obtain a ship and other means of transportation the world opens up drastically to the point where you're not really sure where to go. That was pleasant in the sense that I felt like I was really exploring instead of just following a path the story laid out for me.

While the story was vague, there are enough quests or mini stories in various towns it feels like you're really making a difference. Not only that, but with all these "quests" there are a lot of dungeons and bosses to take on. The bosses in general weren't too difficult but provided a nice change up to the battling. I could sit down in a chair and tackle the problems of a specific town and beat the boss in the dungeon in an hour or so. It made me feel like I was making progress every time I turned on the game.

There were a couple other annoyances. While this game promotes and even requires grinding at times, it actually doesn't set you up to do in a timely manner. For example, when talking to people in towns you can't make the text go faster or skip through anything. I feel like in other DQ games you can so that was a big annoyance. You can make battles sequences go faster but that only helps so much. Checking how much experience you need to advance a level or battles needed for a vocation just takes forever. Also, later in the game I found myself needing to mastering a few vocations and it felt like it took a really long time to do it and I was just waiting to advance the story till I did it. Lastly, there's a fashion show you take on where every time you take it on it takes like 5 minutes and considering there are 8 levels of it it feels like you spend way too much time doing it. Unfortunately one of the items is necessary to the story so you have to do it at least a few times.

Don't get me wrong, I had a fun time playing this game. It had a challenging final boss and a ton of towns and areas to explore and it most definitely had that DQ feel but when compared to others in the series it just isn't quite as good.

100% agree with you that the story is a bit of a mess compared to DQ4 and DQ5. I honestly can't remember what it was about except that it involved dreams somehow. Also 100% agree that grinding for vocations was a complete buzzkill. When I think back to my time with DQ6 in ZSNES on my crappy old Athlon64 PC, all I remember is grinding battles for vocation mastery while watching TV on a different screen. Not a good sign.